Anthem
by Firefly99
Summary: MG2, MGS1, 2 and 3. Big Boss/Ocelot. Secret Santa fic for StarWolfTheInsane. They grew old together, and they decayed.


As a kid, Ocelot had thought that as he got old it would make it worse. It had been the only thing he'd dreaded about age. He'd set out to have his fun before that happened, alright; screamed names long and hard that he'd forgotten the next morning, or would have if he ever forgot anything.

But somehow old age turned a few simple minutes into something more elaborate. His drive hadn't lessened, simply changed. Now, it took work before he was even ready – the Boss's beard scraping a little down his length as he licked and sucked. Now, he didn't get pleasure from sheer force of habit alone – he had to be able to hear that smoke-ruined voice make gasps of surprise, had to see that same flesh, tattered and marbled with hardly-reconstructed burns. The nerves across half of the Boss's torso were dead from the heat and he knew – there had been more than one time when he'd clawed and scratched and dug into it until it bled and the Boss hadn't even noticed until he'd seen the stains under Ocelot's fingernails.

There was nothing left of his nobility, Ocelot thought, as he pulled Ocelot's head wordlessly to him and opened his mouth with two callused fingers, sliding them in under his tongue. _No way to treat an old friend._ All that old compassion had been abandoned, like in all old men like them. Ocelot slid his lips over his teeth and his mouth over the Boss, choked him down as far as he could go, and when Big Boss gave a cry of something between joy and frustration and sunk his teeth into Ocelot's shoulder, he realised what was left. War, and nothing else.

When they'd been young Jack had been nearly naïve, with a single eye that rolled back into his head and a mouth that screamed and a voice that begged to be hurt and a smile that loved every second, loved the pain and the restraint and the feeling of the cold gun barrel tracing down his spine. He knew he loved all that – a man that powerful needed the feeling of having his own pain taken out of his hands for a while. If he hadn't wanted a few new scars to add to his collection, he wouldn't have let Adamska near him. He certainly wouldn't have begged for more.

But now, Ocelot thought, this was the illicit survivor, scarred and burned and haggard, who needed war, made everything he did into war. He gripped him like he would a battle survivor, or a new recruit on the San Hieronymo peninsula, pulling up on Ocelot's knees, drawing himself to his feet, and it was graceless – he allowed himself to relax just as two fingers slid into him, curling up, relaxing him further – he closed his eyes at the pain, registering it as bliss.

"A role-reversal?" he said, as the fingers curled inside him, brushing him effortlessly. Old age had taken away that easy fix, taken away how he would shudder and groan to a halt within only a few minutes. Now, he needed more intensity. More violence.

"What do you mean?" the Boss said, dismissively. His fingers were fully curled up now, and Ocelot groaned with readiness. "We've tried it this way round before enough times. You've never had any problems."

The bastard didn't understand, Ocelot thought, as the Boss pressed at him testingly and then thrust in, hard, and his right hand slammed down to the ground in pain and joy and anger. He clenched his fist, he gasped and sighed, he pulled his knees up closer and dreamt of blood-soaked rooms and the smell of ozone.

Oh, they'd tried all sorts of interesting things. But Jack had never allowed a plastic bag. He'd never allowed electricity. And he wondered, thrashing, gasping, if maybe the Boss was different. He wasn't human enough to have phobias any more.

But they were both human enough to need _this_, and the rhythm increased in speed, and Ocelot bore it for as long as he could, enjoying the sensation of resisting before finally surrendering. He hardly noticed that the Boss had, too.

There were fibre patterns burned into the Boss's body like kimono patterns on a _hibakusha_. He could trace the clear lines at the edge of one of the straps he'd worn around his legs, where the flames hadn't scorched past the leather, if he had at all wanted to reach out like that. What a way to die – a legendary soldier mowed down by an unarmed man not yet out of his twenties. Just as well, then, that he hadn't died.

"Is Solidus still playing to your tune?" Big Boss asked. Ocelot gave a sullen nod.

"Absolutely. He's yet to realise what his whole coup is in aid of." Ocelot's laugh tasted to him like a scrape of old coppery coins under his tongue. "And Liquid has no idea that the government doesn't actually have your remains. When the revolution happens, they won't tell the other one either."

"And he's in the area?"

"Yes, sir. That idea you had earlier about getting him into a hobby which would keep him in the area?" Ocelot said, his chest still rising and falling faster than normal. "It worked excellently. I bribed a Yupik to teach him how to breed dogs. He's been in the Iditarod every year since."

For a moment, Big Boss laid a hand on Ocelot's face, and it was the first time he'd touched him like a friend for a very long time.

"You don't need me to tell you that you're doing good work," he said. "I'd be lost without you." He paused. "Has anyone got any clues about me?"

"Solidus," Ocelot admitted, "seems to be a little suspicious. There's records of your remains being shipped into the country, but he knows the Government doesn't have them. That's why this revolution is important. Solid will kill Liquid, or Liquid will kill Solid – it doesn't matter either way. Whichever one dies, we'll just dress it up and show the corpse to Solidus as proof." He gave a smile, and watched Big Boss's face harden numbly, the way it did whenever his children were mentioned. He was definitely used to that by now.

"You've got the plan," the Boss said. "Make sure it doesn't go wrong. Can you do that?"

Ocelot nodded assent, and the Boss smiled back, with the sick, divorced look in his eye like he was looking down a telescope the wrong way.

"Wonderful," he said. "She'd be proud."

---

Ocelot had thought that maybe Jack had somehow managed to pour himself out of himself, divide it into three parts and give the largest amount to his first-born until the Ivan got nothing. It was a theory propagated by fairy tales and the fact that it was impossible to prove which child had been the first to breathe the air, since they'd all started out identical and grown into different people over time. He'd never forget seeing the three military standard cots, never forget looking over them with as much pride as if the tiny, red-faced, screaming children were his own – in a way, they were, because he'd arranged their birth. If Jack was their father, he was more their mother than the exhausted woman in her cot, sleeping for the first time in the two-day labour, was. Jack provided his genes for them, he'd thought, and he'd provided their conception, and nurtured them as they grew, and nurtured Jack as he grew.

He'd filled the children's lives with spies – no different to a real parent. Most of them had since been shot, most of them by him. Norden had been very useful; Kessler had been nothing short of incredible. Holly, a journalist, was used to asking the right sort of questions and getting along with the right sort of man – her purpose had been to help that idiot along in the flesh, using her sex appeal to gain his trust and keep an eye on him after the mission. Of course, the last part of that had failed, not entirely unexpectedly, when her idiot had revealed he didn't really care about anything more than war.

And then there had been Miller, who had done his job perfectly until he'd began to care for the man he was supposed to be watching and teaching. He'd been expecting that to happen. It was why he'd selected Miller and not another man.

The thing Ocelot had realised years ago, to his pleasure, was that there was no such thing as a true professional. People didn't go about their business completely detached from everything – that was simply impossible. The trick was to attach yourself to the right person, in the right way.

He knew the world too well not to know how redundant it was, being attached to the Boss for who they both used to be.

Did he believe in the Boss's goals? Eternal warfare didn't interest him. It was a given, anyway. That was human nature. Humans needed something to fight, and it was better to give them something absolute, timeless, despicable.

The closest thing he had to something, someone to believe in was the Boss. That was why he'd pulled him out of the flames, blew off the ash, and led him to safety while the copycat upstart fled back home in the hands of Charlie, who'd reported back cheerfully over the radio when he dropped the happy couple off, back in America. The crackly, tinny voice had hissed into his head from what seemed like worlds away as the medics, some of them hardly ten years old, crawled over Big Boss like a single whiteness, trying to return him to consciousness.

Zanzibar Land was nothing like America. America's ethos screamed combat, but it was for the sake of their definition of freedom, honour, religion, or whatever they simply felt like; a nation united by a desire to kill everyone who disagreed with them. Zanzibar's values were combat for the sake of combat, and you could feel the war in the accent the grown men and women had, the way the little children played. He knew the twins who tended to play down at the guest house near the lab – in no other nation would anyone name their son and daughter Colt and Mauser, he thought, except maybe America. That was all the nations had in common – insanity.

When the medics had revived him and shuffled off, he had shooed the cursory few that had lurked paranoid in the wings, waiting for the Boss to need their help, and leant over his injured body. He idly hung the gun on his finger, feeling the comforting weight coursing through his arm.

"Underestimate him again, Boss?" he had asked, and Big Boss's single eye opened in a thin, smoggy crack, welled-up and sore. His face had remained unburned, but half his body was a twisted mass of peeling crimson and charred black – cooked, Ocelot thought. He'd smiled as his memory recognised him as a young man, covered in the filth of the jungle, puckered with electrical burns, and it surprised him, because he'd thought Jack dead.

"Yeah," he'd said, and his voice was a painful reflex from having not spoken for a while, a vocal smoker's cough. "I thought this time he would have killed me. Without a doubt."

Ocelot's eyes had passed along the drip leading into the side of Big Boss's neck, identified the shape of the writing on the label without being close enough to read it properly, and he'd sighed and folded his arms.

"Like anyone could ever kill you, Big Boss," he would have said, thirty-five years ago, expression serious but eyes electric. "Like that fake could ever stand a chance."

There and then, he'd said, "Are you disappointed?"

"Hugely," Big Boss had said. "He was so inventive – clever, too. He could have done much better than he did. Kids these days. Could try so much harder."

Ocelot had allowed the smirk to spread into his eyes.

"By tomorrow," he'd said, "we'll be in America."

Big Boss had made a faint growl deep in his throat, and rolled over slightly on the pillow to face Ocelot more directly. His hand had grasped loosely at the end of the sheet, like a black claw.

"What could there be in America worth returning there? The sooner that nation burns, the sooner - "

Ocelot had shaken his head. "I know you love your country, but look around you. There's nothing here except a bunch of war criminals and dead men. Your son's managed to get back to the States, and that means you've only got a few days before the UN descend into this mess."

"The children?"

"The NGOs will 'save' every one of them," Ocelot had said, "of course. They'll probably make some of the sweeter, grubbier, larger-eyed ones into poster children to prove to everyone how virtuous the organisations are, and help them quietly beg for donations. They won't get the life you wanted them to lead, but they'll live comfortably."

"None of them were killed?"

"The youngest person in the country to die was an eleven-year-old search unit trooper," Ocelot had explained, "codenamed Hedgehog. He died three hours in, from being shot with an assault rifle by your son. The first two shots hit him in the leg and the shoulder, and the third struck him in the head. There was probably only a second between the first and last shots, according to Wren, who informed us. He died, fighting for his country, and suffered little pain. _He_ lived the life you wanted him to have."

Big Boss's eye had slid closed in mourning.

"I see," he had said. "What about Frank?"

"Frank's already headed to America," Ocelot had explained. "He's all but dead. He's fully unconscious, and his heart only beats because of the machine working it for him. His brain occasionally flickers with a hint of life, enough to suggest that maybe, behind his staring eyes, he's thinking of you." Absent-mindedly, he halted the spin of his revolver with a mechanical click. "Maybe he's dreaming of Natasha, who he killed in your name. Or maybe he dreams of Naomi. Perhaps he's fantasising about killing your son in the most humiliating way possible. It doesn't make any real difference. The only reason he's still alive at all is because of the combat enhancements given to him when he was still in his teens. His legs have both been blown off, just below the kneecap, and the rest of his body is shot through with steel bearings from the mines. Nearly every bone in his body has snapped, and his left eye socket has been completely crushed."

Big Boss's face had shuddered in disbelief, until he finally nodded his head.

"I don't need to remind you I have connections in America," Ocelot had continued, "and I made sure to send him into the care of one of the facilities I know. In Zanzibar Land, assuming the UN never come, he might, some day, regain consciousness. But, in America, he might someday fight again."

"When are we leaving?"

Ocelot had instantly noticed the change in the mood, and so had allowed himself to laugh.

"I knew you'd see things my way eventually, sir," he had responded, with a smirk. "You have two hours. In two hours our chariot will arrive."

"They'll never let me back in the country."

"That's why we'll be taking a cargo plane."

"I'm assuming I'll be disguised as cargo?"

"Yes. All you need to do is lie down and pretend to be dead."

"You're disguising me as a corpse? How do you except me to pretend to be dead during my autopsy?"

Ocelot had sighed. "It's all been taken care of. We've managed to obtain a portable unit for restoring basic bodily functions in a corpse, such as respiration, on a purely automatic level. We'll write off the rise and fall of your chest as a side-effect of that."

"What then?"

"My cover story is that you're simply back-up genetic material, kept alive mechanically for the sake of preservation. I have connections. No-one's about to ask too many questions." He'd gestured with the gun like he was teasingly reprimanding the Boss with a finger. "Once we're in America, we can arrange almost anything you want, sir. It's not like Zanzibar."

Big Boss had lain silent for a while.

"When I was about seven or eight years old," he had said, "my family was interned. Neither of my parents were native born Americans. My father was thrown in prison simply for being Japanese, even though he'd lived in America since he was six, and my mother was sent in there with him for marrying him, although she'd been born English. I was shunted around between foster parents until I was nearly sixteen, when I lied about my age to join the 442nd Regimental Combat Team; the all-Japanese-American unit of the Army, mostly made up of men with captured families, like me. I fought for my country, not because I believed in it, but because I just wanted to get away from home. That was where I first saw the spirit of the true patriot, Ocelot," he said, harshly. "It was there in the hearts of those men who fought, even though their families had been persecuted. Their country had given them nothing, and yet they fought for America. And that was how I managed to grow up believing in things like honour and liberty."

"And then you met her, of course," Ocelot had said, and his eyes had snaked over the drip again. It had to be responsible.

"Then I met her."

For a fraction of a second, Ocelot had remembered the time he'd leant over and kissed that powder-burned eye, when he had been young, when they'd both been young, and when they were two young-old soldiers out to change the world. Now, they were simply bitter.

With a spin of the gun, Ocelot knocked the drip out of the Boss's arm in a spurt of fluid. The Boss gave a grunt, as if he was too injured to be truly indignant, and too tired to be surprised.

"What was that?"

"I don't need you high on morphine during the flight," Ocelot had explained. "You've never talked that much about yourself to me before. The only reason you'd ever start trusting me with things you've probably been locking up since you were a child is if you were drugged."

Big Boss's eye had opened a little wider. "I'm surprised you're not taking advantage of this state of mind."

"You know something I don't?"

"Shut up, Ocelot."

Ocelot had looked down at his face.

"Go For Broke," he had advised, pressing the tip of his finger into the cloth of the eyepatch, before turning and leaving the hospital.

---

The breeze had rattled through the chain-mesh fences.

Through the blurry camera, Ocelot had seen the target – a figure, a slim man, climbing a long ladder to the radio platform, occasionally glancing down at the soldiers patrolling below, berets adjusted to keep their eyes from being scorched in the evening Zanzibar sun. With five or six men guarding a meadow with next to no cover, moving in a tight patrol, no-one could feasibly slip past undetected without murdering them all or coming up with a more elaborate plan, and this child had proven to be capable of both.

Big Boss calmly switched the camera to the inside of the booth as the man approached, effortlessly broke the neck of the radio operator in less than a minute, and started toying with the wires on the console, the soldier still on the floor. He watched, nervously, perhaps imagining a planted bomb, an elaborate sabotage. Ocelot simply tapped a finger lazily against his knee. He knew where this was going.

A voice rang out over the Zanzibar Land plains. It was low, and full, and young, and perfectly in key with the swelling orchestra surrounding it. The singer was untrained; his voice cracking on some of the greater leaps, but there was a sheer energy, a passion.

The soldiers gazed at the PA system, transfixed.

"He's inventive," Big Boss said, eventually. "I'll give him that."

Ocelot had given a short laugh.

"I don't think he has the right voice for this kind of music," he said. "He's more suited to a smoky club than to nationalist inspiration."

"He's really getting into it," responded Big Boss, with a frown.

The singer continued, voice filled with promises of victory in war and economic success. Ocelot recalled Big Boss's anxiety to write an anthem; how he'd gone to the labs and demanded one of them own up to being able to play a musical instrument, and how a nerd who'd played bass in a rock group in his teens and a violinist had crowded around a piano with him, which none of them had known how to play. The Boss had hummed snatches of a tune – majestic and pompous and ambitious – and demanded that it sounded like a proper anthem, while the violinist made some vague threats about tonal, dominant, and subdominant chords and how most national anthems had them in there. Eventually, after four hours of fighting and smoking, they'd come up with something listenable, and Big Boss had thoughtfully recalled that the British national anthem started out as a drinking song, and so they were already one up on them.

A soldier slid his beret into his hands and gripped it as if it might pour out onto the ground beneath him.

The voice reached a crescendo – it had reached the final verse.

"_Wond'rous nation..._" it sang, probably not knowing the first draft of the lyrics had been written down by Big Boss on the back of a napkin before he'd cleaned them up by tapping them out on his ancient MSX, "_Will lead us in noble wa-ar-fare; Sold-iers, go on-wards for Zan-zi-bar La-a-and!_"

The song shut off with an audible tape-player click, and there was a silence.

Big Boss leant over the screen.

"He's going back down the ladder now," Ocelot observed for him. "After that rousing number."

"That's Chameleon and Tiger," Big Boss frowned, watching two young soldiers collapse into each others' arms, weeping. "I knew they were patriotic, but I thought they'd have more sense than _that_."

"I thought it was pretty stirring myself," smiled Ocelot. "Your son certainly carries a tune better than you do."

The soldier who'd removed his beret saluted the PA pole with ferocity, the tears rolling down his cheeks visible even from the distant, grainy footage. If he had been at all aware of his surroundings, he would have noticed a strange soldier dressed in enemy colours with long, blond hair dashing behind him in a silent, crouching run, the mouth that had sung a patriotic anthem with such fake, believable sincerity now shut.

"He thinks like you," Ocelot observed. "You should be proud your genes had such a profound effect on the way his mind works."

"He thinks like me?"

Ocelot rolled his eyes. That speech habit of his had never gone away.

"When you were observing the children, Boss," Ocelot said, "I saw him throwing chocolate in one of the acid pools."

"He was trying to neutralise it?"

"That's what I'd guess."

Big Boss sighed. "And I'm supposed to think like that?"

"You threw live snakes at people. You shot a beehive at me."

"You're never going to forgive me for that, are you?" Big Boss leaned forward, onto his elbows. "How long before he went off to get a fire extinguisher?"

"I made it six minutes before I couldn't stand to keep watching," Ocelot sighed. "For all I know he could have neutralised the whole pool."

"That's just - " Big Boss said, coughing a little, "that's just _silly_. He couldn't have done."

"Why are you telling me this, sir?" Ocelot smirked. "Remember, you're the one who drugged half of the base with sedative mushrooms."

Somewhere in the room a machine snapped onto standby, and the change in the pitch of its hum pierced the conversation.

"Well, it worked," Big Boss said, and Ocelot considered protesting its dignity, but agreed too much with the sentiment.

---

It was unusual seeing so many different men with the same face – or it would have been, if anything besides the Boss surprised Ocelot these cold days. The most enigmatic part of them was, to him, how they all managed to look completely different without doing much more than arranging everything around their faces in the correct way.

As he stared at Liquid, he re-registered the way the muscles in his face had a certain tension not seen in any of the others. His cheekbones were a little finer than the others, his skin in better condition as the only non-smoker in the entire family. He tended to hold his mouth more pursed than the others; his eyes a hint wider; and it changed the shape of the wrinkles that were beginning to etch themselves into his face; a smoother forehead, rougher eyelids.

"Raven told me," Liquid said, the natural growl in his voice suppressed by years of practice, "that you were in Zanzibar Land when it fell."

"This is about your father, isn't it?" Ocelot said.

"You brought his body back to the States!" Liquid snapped, pivoting fluidly, emphasising his words with an arrogant sweep of his hands. If Big Boss had made the same gesture Ocelot would have laughed until he cried. "You must have seen what state he was in."

"Do you know how he died?"

"I heard it was a brutal battle," Liquid said, almost wistfully, "between a strong man and a lucky one."

Ocelot grimaced. "You heard right. When I found him he was burned to death. His face was in perfect condition – it was almost eerie."

Liquid made a sound of disgust.

"Are his genes intact?"

"Yes, sir." _Of course._

"And you know where he is?"

"That's the problem," Ocelot said, allowing shame to slip into his voice. "_They_ got hold of him from the facility I was keeping an eye on, and moved him to an undisclosed location."

"And it's fair to say there isn't a way of finding out?"

"We're dealing with Them. They have all the finest minds in the world working towards making sure there's no leaks of information anywhere – it's airtight."

Liquid folded his arms. "I _am_ one of the finest minds in the world. And you surpass even me. There's a way, Ocelot."

In Ocelot's mind, he scoffed at Liquid's lofty proclamation. Big Boss was far beyond this pale imitation, and had always been so modest until almost the end of his humanity. The mind he had naively let himself love had long gone now, and the body had decayed. They'd aged to need one another – it was the only explanation, and one he didn't loathe as much as he was meant to.

"There is a way," he said, as if the idea had only just occurred to him, and as if Solidus and he hadn't plotted it all out the previous night. "There's a way to get the remains and get rid of your brother, too."

"Get rid of my brother?"

Liquid had the tic too. It was genetic. He didn't know how it was, but it had to be.

"Well, obviously. We hold a revolution."

Liquid bristled, stirred by the idea, but unable to admit it.

He explained the plan, and watched those familiar, brutal, clever eyes take it all in, take down every detail.

They were all inherently trusting men, for all their show of wisdom and slyness. Solidus (with the second broadest cheekbones, and the squarest line to his chin, and hair which he carefully bleached and dyed silver-grey to give the illusion of appropriate presidential age) was the most underhand one they had, and that was because he'd learned his social dynamics as a seventeen-year-old child soldier leading the most depraved army ever to exist. He'd done his work, hunted around for the handful of uniquely talented people who tended to get railroaded into conflict by people like him; made a unit with a seven-year-old girl who could recover from a gunshot wound in less than five minutes, and a blind boy of about five who could smell blood weeks after it was cleaned up, and an eleven-year-old who had to be kept separately from the others because he made electronic devices go haywire by simply being in the area, and a bunch of other freaks like that, most of whom were now lying dead or being brainwashed with drugs in rehab centres. But his favourite had always been that tiny, wiry ghost-white child with the blue eyes. The White Devil. Someone who could stand out with natural talent amongst psychics and magicians had a gift like nothing else, and he'd been worth keeping an eye on. Oh, he had plans for that one, far surpassing this little triple-cross with a father and his two sons.

He wasn't deluded enough to make himself think his motive was that Liquid needed to think of Big Boss as dead for the plan to work – even though that was crucial, there was always another way. He wanted to protect Big Boss, wanted to keep all the stupid and petty things in this damnable world away from him so he could build his nation. And Liquid was nothing if not petty.

---

The stitches were raised on his arm, a final boundary between him and Liquid, as if he could just reach for the tab and unzip the despicable stump and leave it to rot. The unmatching skintone turned his own paler skin to paper, and he thought that maybe he should just chainsaw the whole thing off.

No, he realised, that wouldn't work. Liquid had hooks into his brain now – even if the arm was no longer attached, Liquid would always be lurking uncontrollably, unreachably inside him.

Solidus regarded him with those eyes, hazier than his brothers', before handing him the plastic-wrapped syringes.

"I trust you have more than enough good reason to use these," he said. "Be careful. You _know_ we can only get hold of a few of these a year on our current budget while remaining underground."

"Right," Ocelot said, as if he'd take the advice to heart and hadn't known it already. They all had little keys, little buttons to press. Solidus needed to be flattered and worshipped; Liquid patronised; and Solid's best side was only visible in a fight – except to that awkward _hikikomori _of a hacker, he reminded himself, who'd managed to delude himself into thinking Solid was as human as his father.

He slid off into solitude, ducking under the trailing wires of the electronic equipment before pulling himself down onto one of the powerful computers. The Emmerich girl's OS smiled and talked him slickly through the steps. He ripped the first syringe from the packet and plunged it into the depths of Liquid's arm. He waited for five minutes, impatiently, until the computer spat a dialogue at him saying it had processed all his brain structure from the nanomachine data. Perfect. He scratched a message to himself with his pen on the back of one of the peeled off labels – _erased important mem at 5:24 PM, mental security compromised, safety of VIP more important than brain's integrity – burn in hell, Liquid. _It was an immature taunt, but Liquid had to know what he was capable of.

He slammed the other set of nanomachines into the parasite arm, selected the Delete protocol on the screen, and thought of Big Boss's current location. He recalled the nights they'd spent together, the plan he'd written, until he realised he was thinking about nothing and attempted dreamily to work backwards through his own thought connections until they weren't there. Finally, he thought of finding him in Zanzibar, burning, and as the flames licked away the memory crumbled until his mind was blank.

He turned off the Delete function, careful not to meditate on anything, or the nanoes would block that out too. It was done.

He discarded the neural structure back-up, turned off the computer, and then slid off the cabinet at the side and put a magnet to the hard disk, before getting up and returning to Solidus. He found himself humming an old tune he hadn't heard in years, majestic and pompous and ambitious and sounding not at all like it had been banged out on a broken piano by three people who had had no idea how to play it.

---

He and Jack had once sat side by side in a plane, waiting to return to America. They had still smelt of a toxic mix of desert sand and gunpowder, and as Ocelot had toyed with the gun Jack leaned over with a flick of too-long golden-brown hair and gazed out the window. Ocelot saw the blank expression reflected on the surface of the glass.

"Notice something?" he'd asked, slight laugh in his voice. Maybe, an unfocused part of his mind thought, he should grow out his own hair to look like that.

"It's an oil field," Jack had said. Ocelot looked, and indeed it was – rows and rows of pistons nodding sycophantically against the glint of the sun.

"The US need that," Jack said, "if they even want to sustain what they have now. With the oil reserves vanishing at the speed they are now, they can charge whatever they like, and the US will gladly fork over."

"Mm," Ocelot had said. At that time he hadn't been trained enough to realise he was about to witness something pivotal. He should, in retrospect, have seen it coming.

"So the US pays and the oil is traded. America uses it to grease the general standard of living. These nations use the cash to buy weapons, made in the States, and fight civil wars in a sick little survival of the fittest and strengthen themselves until they become too dangerous, or too expensive, to appease. And then the US simply deploys soldiers to kill everyone and take everything they have, after a long, suffering decline. It's...warped. The whole system's warped."

"How long did it take you to figure that out?" Ocelot teased.

"Don't you think it'd be better if the whole thing just burned?"

Ocelot had frowned. "I don't understand."

"I'm tired of America," Jack growled. "I'm tired of the Philosophers. The world doesn't need them."

"No," Ocelot said, "it doesn't. But the people in America are mostly innocent."

"I want to see America as a battlefield," Jack said, and his voice was even, cold, commanding. "It's starting to be the most beautiful idea I can imagine."

His fingers pressed against the glass of the window in a tripod.

"And you remember what _she_ used to say, don't you?" he continued. "I hate this. I hate war. That's obvious. Who the hell would like it? But I need it - I need it more than anything, and I need to see America become one long battlefield from the West Coast all the way down to the Atlantic."

"Is that what you want?" Ocelot asked, serious. Finally, _finally_, Jack was seeing things his way. "Why don't you make that world?"

Jack drew in a sharp intake of air and let it out in a mist on the window.


End file.
